The Ad Blocking War Rages On

The Ad Blocking War Rages On

This week Facebook announced the launch of a new technology to prevent the use of ad blockers on their desktop website. This feature was implemented to protect the incredible revenue generated on their ad platform. Facebook execs lauded the tech and indicated that it would be extremely difficult to defeat without providing a significantly slower user experience on the site. Unfortunately for them, that didn’t last long.

Just about 48 hours after Facebook’s announcement AdBlock Plus, one of the leading ad blocking plugins, announced that their community had found a workaround to provide a speedy, ad-free experience on the social network. As a user of ad blocking tech in my personal browsing this is a welcome announcement, but there are two other takeaways here that are pretty important.

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Instagram Steals From Snapchat – What It Means

Instagram Steals From Snapchat

While some people say that ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ I have a hard time believing that Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel agrees at the moment. In case you missed it, Instagram launched their own version of Stories, and it’s pretty much a dead copy of Snapchat’s Stories feature.

There are some serious implications here, for both Instagram and Snapchat, which I broke down in an article on the Breakaway blog last week. Head over there to find out what it means.

Read It @ Breakaway

IOC: Don’t Even Consider Tweeting About The Olympics

Official IOC Rio 2016 Olympics Look and Feel

Planning a campaign to take advantage of the hype surrounding the Olympics in Rio? That might not be the best idea.

AdWeek is reporting that the International Olympic Committee and the United States Olympic Committee will be enforcing their right to prevent businesses from speaking publicly about the Olympics.

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Are Digital Experiment Results Lying To Us?

Experiment Results can be Misleading

Just about every change made to a digital platform is measurable, and that’s awesome. Recently, however, I have been worrying that the results and performance metrics we’re using to evaluate these changes might not be telling the whole story.

While we can measure the impact of people who act a specific way, what about the impact on visitors who don’t take action? Those silent visitors might have had a negative experience, but because they aren’t the group taking action, we may never know a change or experiment impacts them. Let me give you an example…

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4 Optimization Insights from Donald, Bernie, & Hillary

Presidential Campaign Website Insights

Let’s get something straight; I’m not interested in discussing the views and stances of the three remaining presidential candidates. While I might insult them for wearing frumpy shoes, having a head shaped like a minecraft character, or revealing something pretty personal, this article focuses on the usability, design and functionality of the candidates’ official campaign websites.

I’m always looking for new strategies and techniques to increase on-page conversions, and one of the best places to find them is on high performing websites. The digital campaign hubs for Trump, Sanders, and Clinton have been some of the most visited on the web, and all that traffic data allows for insane levels of testing and optimization. Though the public doesn’t have access to any of the hard data (unless Hillary’s site is hosted on her email server), there are some insights to be gleaned from looking at the front end.

Below are four things I found on these websites that are probably worth testing on your own web projects.

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Designed and authored by Mathew Bernstein.
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